My army husband is currently stationed at Fort Riley so we have called Kansas home for the past year and a half. Several months ago I was approached about making a quilt for the Friends of Fort Riley Museums society to raffle off as a fundraiser. Sure, I can do that.
At first, I thought I would make one of my current patterns for them in red (Fort Riley is known as the Big Red One).
Then, I thought maybe I would make a fun apple themed quilt as there are lots really cute apple quilt patterns (Apple Days is a huge community-wide event here).
Then, I decided sunflowers were a better representation of Kansas and Fort Riley as a whole. I happened to have a draft of a sunflower pattern sketched already, so I thought maybe I could take that draft, refine it, and turn it into a full pattern.
THEN, I thought "what if I made it SCRAPPY!"
What started a relatively simple project that might have taken me a week to sew together and then quilt, all the sudden, turned into a full blown project! I'm fully aware I did this to myself, and I have no regrets.
To make this quilt scrappy, I pulled all of my yellow, green, and brown fabrics. Unfortunately, green and brown are my least used fabric colors. Why couldn't sunflowers be blue? I have more blue scraps that I could ever use! Luckily, I have friends who came to the rescue and sent me all the green and brown fabric scraps they had stashed away. Shout out to Fran of Cotton and Joy and Sarah of SarahJeanMakes for helping me make this quilt happen!
Making a scrappy quilt like this was a labor of love. I worked on block at a time, one segment at a time to ensure I could use as many fabrics as possible. I made majority of the units in each of these blocks using the stitch and flip method. It was more time consuming but so so worth it.
The end result just sparkles!
I quilted this one myself on my Janome using a serpentine/wavy stitch spaced about an inch apart.
